


To Rule the Varied Year

by bachlava



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:14:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bachlava/pseuds/bachlava
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Loki are both creatures of ice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Rule the Varied Year

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to [zelda_zee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zelda_zee) for beta-reading. Any remaining errors are my own.

  
_See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,  
          Sullen and sad, with all his rising train;  
          Vapors, and Clouds, and Storms._    -James Thomson, “Winter” (1726)  
  
  
  
  
To find himself back in the confidences of his brother is a strange thing to Loki, stranger still for how rarely he had been in them at the end of his long stay in Asgard. The truce between them is a brittle thing, and Thor’s anger is not the only cause of it.  
  
Despite it, Loki thinks, his brother is keen not only to win some measure of acceptance for Loki from his newfound shield brethren, but also to mend the breach he had made between them long ago. Loki himself lacks such keenness, but he tolerates Thor’s. Patience with one’s allies in the face of the foe that unites them is a necessity, and Loki has never lacked in patience. Silently he blesses the threat that was grave enough to require his being brought out of exile, while aloud he schemes with these Avengers and spars with them. Quietly he spies on them and lies to them because they would suspect him of greater trickery if he seemed not to.  
  
It is tempting to see them as he had before: their unwed Widow, small and weak as any mortal but fancying herself apart from them; the little hawk-man, who Loki knows well enough and who will not hear him speak; a weakling made strong only by the crudest artifice; a man with a tin heart that loves only gold; a brute beast in the mask of a cringing man. But the sum of his judgment was an error beneath Loki’s wit. It was beneath even Thor’s wit, and it shames Loki to think of his own folly. Laziness as well as folly -- and laziness has never proved of benefit.  
  
So he comes to know them, an easy task since they are so eager to conceal themselves from him. Their true fears and wants, their strongest doubts and convictions, the deepest secrets of their memories and hearts: they display them as badges, and think they have hidden them well. For all their frailty, though, their minds are at least stronger than many of their fellows’, and of some in other realms. They are better in body as well, Clint and Natasha through long practice alone, Stark out of desperation, Banner by accident, and Steven Rogers by more complicated circumstance.

 

It’s Steve who his attention rests on. For a mortal, he looks almost as if he hailed from Asgard; but for some superficialities in appearance, he might fit well there. Though Loki harbours no great love for the realm that would only accept him through deceit or else cast him out as a monster, there is pleasure to be had in small familiarities. And Steve makes good use of his mind instead of ever blunting it by intemperance.

  
His strength is real, too, even if it is conjured. Loki thinks it was simply hidden in that frail body, waiting to break forth and flourish. That conjuring has failed on other men, after all. Other men could also outwit most of Asgard’s warriors, and a very few could best some in a fight. But Steve is more able than all of them to withstand the cold. In that, he is the only creature in Midgard or Asgard that might conceive of matching Loki himself.  
  
Loki in his Jötunn form, that is. The Æsir can bear less cold. It vexes Loki to lack full grasp of his own capacities. He does not yet know his Jötunn form well, only that he can have it at will, that it is no mere disguise, that it is strength. But his birth-race are giants of the frost, and in climes of Midgard they could not endure. Loki has taken their form in the coldest places he can find here, but each time he could stand the heat no longer than nine blinks of the eye. Only at the ends of the earth, he thinks, would he come to know that strength as he wishes, as is his birthright. The ends of the earth or, perhaps, the depths of its oceans, the cradle where the Captain slept away his infancy and from whence he woke to glory.  
  
  
  
  
The group of them go their separate ways when they take respite in New York. None of them makes secret from the others what he does -- they could not, if they wished -- but they value their privacy. Steve values steadiness as well, and this makes him easy to track: few taverns remain that are like those of his youth. He favours a small, dark one that few people visit. Loki takes care to follow him discreetly.  
  
On the first crisp night of autumn Steve hangs his coat on a rack near the door: foolish, Loki thinks; someone might steal it. The clutch of his fingers on his glass make plain that he could use its warmth even at the bar, sitting rigidly as befits a soldier. The beer he drinks is not what he needs: weak, cool stuff that barely seems to wet his lips. But Loki does not mention this at first, only takes the barstool next to Steve’s so quickly and so quietly that Steve will wonder if he did not simply appear. There is a puzzled expression on Steve’s face for a moment. “Don’t tell me you decided to join me for a beer,” he says.  
  
“Of course not.” Loki catches the tavern-keeper’s eye and says, “Svedka. With ice.” Weak Midgard liquor, but the hint of a cold burn is just possible to taste. “This is better than your ales,” he says to Steve.  
  
“I doubt it tastes much better.”  
  
“You lack discernment."

Steve gives a little snort. “I’m not the only one who does. And I can drink your brother under the table.”  
  
“I haven’t come here to speak of Thor.”  
  
“If I asked why you have, would you lie or just change the subject?”  
  
Loki only smiles and sips his drink as Steve takes his next glass of beer. Unlike Thor and his companions, Steve sets the glass down after each swallow and does not keep his hands on the stein. It’s only when he’s drained it that Loki says, “If you’re cold, why do leave your coat aside?”  
  
Steve looks at him with surprise, not, Loki thinks, because Steve had forgotten his presence -- only a fool would think that -- but because he thought he had concealed the cold he feels. Loki waits until Steve meets his eyes to say, as if in explanation, “I have long known a chill deeper than the sunless depths of the ocean. I know ice and frost that would splinter the bones of a bear, and been held within them longer than a man’s lifetime. I know what blood-halting waves have been upon you, and I know, Steven Rogers, that the winter drawing near us will be a long one, fell and dark.”  
  
For a full minute Steve stares at him as if to demand an answer to an unvoiced question:  _Why have you come here?_  Loki thinks, or  _How many lies are you telling?_  But all he says in the end is, “I’m sorry, did you want to commiserate?”  
  
“No, nor to watch your suffering. But know this: you will always feel the touch of that cold, and if you should live another ninety years, still the master of your body will be a north wind calling from the depth of winter.”  
  
Steve breaks the gaze between them. “They said you’d never get out of your chains, either.”  
  
“The same ones who call me the lie-smith.”  
  
“Well, I’ll leave my drinks on the liar tonight, if it’s all the same to you,” Steve says.  
  
Loki makes no argument, and Steve nearly forgets his coat on the way out of the tavern. Nearly, but not quite. The man still has some wits about him.  
  
Wits, but not warmth.  
  
Loki gives the tavern-keeper a twenty-dollar bill. “I believe you owe me change,” he murmurs.  
  
The barman looks at his till in confusion. “I’ll be damned. Looks like I do,” he says, an apologetic smile on his face, and puts two fifties in Loki’s hand.  
  
  


  
Loki knows as well as any of the others, knows more than any of the others, how their hard-trained captain fights, and, better, how he thinks. He knows, too, that Steve is by nature a son of the day, longing for an August’s sunlight to warm his skin. And so it will, when August comes, but a man is more than his skin. And winter is the strongest of the seasons, setting in deeper than any other and enduring to the last instant of its long reign.  
  
“The sweat on you tells a lie,” Loki says, after a full day’s sparring. Steve nearly schools his expression into indifference -- nearly -- and resumes a fighter’s stance. “Then let’s go some more rounds until it doesn’t,” he says.  
  
On another day, the smallest of shivers passes through Steve’s body, and Steve’s alone, as the lot of them stand arguing over strategy. Steve glances around the circle wanting, Loki suspects, to reassure himself that no one has noticed. No one else has, and when Steve’s eyes rest on him, Loki smiles. The days are shorter now, and colder, and Steve shuns the warm garments that the others wear. A man with something to prove to himself, Loki thinks, and no other motive could match that one for making him persist in his course.  
  
But autumn continues dying, mocking the captain’s resolve. Loki finds ever more pleasure in watching Steve struggle to prepare himself coffee with the machines that are at hand for the task. They’ve grown too complex during Steve’s time in the ice. “Such foolish ostentation,” Loki says one day. “I have drink that will warm you better.”  
  
Steve switches off the coffee maker and sets a pot on the stove. “Are you making a joke, or is it straight-up poison?”  
  
“Neither one, I assure you.”  
  
“You’ll pardon me for not being assured.”  
  
“Oh, I’ll assure you,” Loki says, and the water boils. Steve pours himself a mug’s worth -- black; there is no longer milk on Midgard worth the drinking, and Steve frowns when he sees the others’ extravagance with it. “That drink won’t warm you, Captain,” Loki repeats. “You’ll come to my quarters yet, when you long badly enough for one that does.”  
  
Steve says nothing to this, and Loki waits. He is patient, but he longs for the time when he and Thor might have wagered over when Steve would yield. It would not be a victory to boast of -- there were few who Loki could not persuade, if he had a mind to it -- but Thor had not once refused a wager. And this wager, like most others, Loki would have won.  
  
  
  
  
The lot of them are in New York again when the year is at its darkest. It’s the time when men see as if anew, year after year, that though the days will only lengthen they will lengthen too slowly to observe, and that though the wind whistles through their bones, greater cold is yet to come. Even now, when the humans in their stupidity and weakness have made their world inhospitably warm, there remain bursts of cold that are hard for a mortal body to endure. They are fewer, to be certain, but they still come, and it’s in one of them that Steve Rogers, alone in the dark bar but for Loki’s company, sets aside his beer and says, “You said you had something warmer?”  
  
“I have drink to warm you better.”  
  
“Sounds more or less the same to me.”  
  
Loki will let Steve discover the difference on his own. “Come with me,” he says, and when Steve still hesitates, Loki goes on, “Do you think, Captain, that even Thor could protect me from his shield-mates’ wrath if I were to harm you? That he would even wish to try? I have endured the same anger before, and there is no mischief I could work on you that is worth the risk of wearing the bridle of his punishment a second time, when I could not slip it the first.” He dismisses those thoughts and softens. “I am more skilled than any liar the nine worlds have seen. Do you know how I came to be?”  
  
“I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”  
  
“By telling the truth often. If you would call me a liar now, have proof of it.” They are words a man like Steve will hear as a challenge he would be craven to refuse, that he therefore will not refuse even if it is folly to take it up.  
  
And Steve does, without a word, following Loki to the apartment that he keeps here. He hesitates at the door. “My quarters are no more dangerous than yours, Steven,” Loki tells him, and Steve comes in. The quarters are not grand, they do not befit a prince, but for the present they suffice. Loki has had much worse.  
  
Steve looks around the half-lit space intently nonetheless. “When I was a little boy, there was a Viking storybook,” he says. “This place looks kind of like one of the pictures in it.”  
  
Loki laughs. “Oh, it’s much more comfortable than the Norse kings had of old.”  
  
“I bet it is,” Steve says, and though Loki doesn’t miss the many implications in those words, he chooses to ignore them. He seats Steve at a low wood table and brings drink. “What is that?” Steve asks.  
  
“Suttungrmjadthar, the mead of poets. You have never had the like.”  
  
“I wouldn’t know.”  
  
“Have you never tasted the wine that flows from honey?” Steve shakes his head. “There’s little use in drinking what you mortals can brew. But Suttungrmjadthar is wasted on your kind.”  
  
“And yet you’re just giving it to me.”  
  
 _You have arrived where I wanted_ , Loki thinks, but he says, “Oh, you are not like your kind, Captain Rogers. You feel it and you know it, every minute that you draw breath as one living and feel cold as one dead.” Steve lifts his cup with some hesitation. “Drink it deeply; this is nothing to be sipped.”  
  
Steve obeys, and Loki watches as the mead takes hold of him. Color comes to his cheeks, his eyes fix on some invisible point, his lips part as though he were about to speak but cannot find the words. He is one of those the mead will give no gift of words, then. It only needs to make him understand.  
  
Words come to Loki’s lips instead, the same words that he once gave the poets. “Are you warmer, orphaned son?” he asks. “Or do you still feel on you the winter, that son of Vindsvalr, that kills serpents and calls up tempests? What was that time you spent frozen beneath the sea?”  
  
Steve looks at him for a minute, dumbstruck, but not, Loki thinks, dull-minded. “You seem to think you know already,” he says at last.  
  
“Oh, I know you, Captain, for you bear in your body the awful winter, the time when snow drives from every corner with dread frost and knife-sharp wind, until the sun has lost its strength. And on that winter follows another and yet another with no summer in between.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And was it a wintry sea, the kind men once sang of? When the wall-felling winds wove fierce over the waves, and tore across it the sky’s storm-glad daughters, begotten of grim frost? A sea the stern snow-wind has thrust out with all its strength as a ship from the land, a land lost as the water broadens? Is this the cold you carry with you?”  
  
“You know it is.”  
  
“And shall I tease out the ice-splinter lodged in your breast? Shall this be Midgard’s boon to me, exiled prince of the frost?”  
  
“Take it out?”  
  
Suttungrmjadthar indeed has not clouded Steve’s judgment if he hesitates to trust Loki. Loki  _will_  have the cold from him, but he would prefer to have it without enmity. He knows well how to wait. “The cold that weighs on you, and nothing more, for I can take nothing else,” he promises. “Could I take your wits or strength, I would have done it long ago.” After a long moment, Steve nods, and Loki goes on, “I will take but a sliver of that chill splinter this night. You will know just a little measure of it gone, and then choose to grant me the rest or deny it."  
  
“And you mean to keep your word?”  
  
“In this I cannot break it,” Loki lies. “And no man will be able to call you the fool for heeding the voice of Laufey’s son.”  
  
“Yes,” Steve whispers.  
  
“Then speak truly to me, shield-fellow: Was it only for the drink that you came here?”  
  
Steve meets his eyes then. “No,” he says. “No, it wasn’t.”  
  
Loki does not break his gaze. He half-whispers, “Then lie down on the bed.”  
  
Though Steve’s mind is his own, it is like one enthralled that he goes there and lies stiff on his back. He needs calming. Loki bids the lights dim lower, and he brings the mead to the bedside. “Here,” he says, urging Steve up to take a goblet, “and I will bring that cold to the top of your heart to draw a drop out of it.”  
  
They both drink, and Loki rests his hands on Steve’s shoulders. “Shall I tell you what this mead showed your bards, long ago? Where they said the cold had its birth?” Steve closes his eyes and nods, and Loki goes on, “They believed that before men were many, streams that flowed with ice came so far from their source that the poison leaven they frothed with was hard and fast, as molten rock spewed from a mountain. And when the stream flowed no more, rain rose from the venomous yeast and froze into rime, and one layer of ice was laid on another all into the north. And so it went until all the north was filled with heavy ice and fast rime, and everywhere in it a bitter wind blew, lashing rain, and the land was cold and grim.”  
  
Steve’s skin is no colder, but Loki feels him shiver through his shirt. “Your poets of old knew something of your proving-ground. Those who knew it well froze and passed into the ninth realm, but those who knew but little dreamed of more, when my kind whispered it to them.” Under Steve’s shirt Loki’s hands find warm goose-flesh, and when his muscles seem almost to contract, the ice-splinter throbs out from Steve’s heart, from his mind, and Loki melts nine drops of it to freeze within himself. He longs for more, he thirsts for it all, but he bridles the urge. “Open your eyes, Steven Rogers,” he whispers, and presses together their lips.  
  
Steve’s kiss is mead-sweet and slow, nervous, but his mouth tastes like a balm to Loki’s thirst for freezing. He rests his fingertips on Steve’s cheeks and calls into his mind the well-fed hearth of a king, air electrified by lightning, the noontime sun in the fullest summer. Steve gasps and jerks against Loki’s body, and Loki kisses him deeper. He moves his thumbs over Steve’s eyelids, which flutter closed, and rests them there, light as little butterflies. Steve’s kiss grows desperate, and Loki moves his hands downward, whispering warmth onto Steve’s neck and his shoulders. “Once, I would have thought you were impossible,” he murmurs, glorying in the body his hands uncover. “A perfectly formed man. Something unknown among your kind.”  
  
Loki can see that Steve is trying to keep his mind. He shakes his head and gasps, “No, you’re wrong. I’m not -- ”  
  
“Oh, but you are a blend of the wisest craft of man and nature, Steven Rogers.” Steve’s body is smooth and hard as the fastest frozen ice, but it is golden, too, and it can bend and flex as even Loki cannot coax ice to do. He must feel the garments being removed from his feet, his legs, his hips, but his eyes stay closed and he moves his body with no finer purpose than  _toward Loki_.  
  
He is a beautiful sight, naked under Loki’s gaze. Loki has never possessed Thor’s impulse to deem these mortals lovely, but he cannot deny what is before his eyes. It seems as if all the muscles in Steve’s body are flexed, trembling in desire. Those perfectly pink lips are wet and parted with kissing, his head thrown back, and this with Loki’s having scarcely touched him. His cock juts out hard and heavy, a proud thing. In a foolish rush of feeling Loki wishes to own him, to possess him entirely, and would think to make it so.  
  
It would be madness, though; Steve Rogers is no man to be possessed. One who is useful, yes, and Loki will enjoy him thoroughly while he is. With his tongue he covers the terrain of golden skin before him, and he takes with his fingertips the measure of that expanse. A scrape of teeth or a pinch to a hardened nipple brings Steve surging against him, and Loki rues that Steve is loathe to beg. “Put your hands on me,” Loki whispers.  
  
Steve splays his hands across Loki’s chest, his touch light at first but then growing firmer. If he wonders why Loki’s clothes feel so thin, he says nothing, and then he moves his hands onto bare skin. His fingers are not subtle, but neither are they clumsy, and there’s a tantalizing hint of coldness in their strength. Loki fixes that coldness in his mind, and Steve shivers. “The blankets, then,” he says and arranges Steve beneath them, joins him. He’s dispensed with his own clothing, and they press their bodies together, skin to skin. There’s the friction of arms and legs entwined together, the press of muscle, of hardened nipples and of Steve’s heavy cock flush up against his, their balls brushing across one another’s. Loki moves, thrusting down, and Steve meets him. “Yes, that’s it,” Loki says, and he slips his cock between Steve’s thighs.  
  
Steve’s eyes fly open at that, of course. “Oh, don’t worry, Captain, that isn’t how I aim to have you.” Not tonight, anyway. He shifts so that Steve is on top of him. When their eyes meet, Loki grins. “You’re going to fuck me.”  
  
“Oh, am I?” Steve says with a hint of defiance. He is not one to take orders from Loki.  
  
“You will love it,” Loki assures him. “But you want to know what’s in it for me, don’t you? You don’t believe that I could want this in its own right.” He guides Steve’s hand around their erections. There’s fluid at the heads, and Steve moans as Loki mingles it with circles of his fingers. “It’s only my tongue that tells lies, Captain.”  
  
“Like that one,” Steve gasps, still thrusting his hips against Loki.  
  
Loki presses the length of his body against Steve’s and kisses him hungrily and, when Steve’s eyes flutter closed, dips his fingers into the mead. When he draws them out again, they’re slick with oil, and he makes himself ready in the blink of an eye. He makes his thighs a cradle for Steve’s hips. “You know what to do, then?” he half-taunts, but Steve still hesitates. Loki rests a hand against his cheek and says more gently, “You cannot hurt me, Steven. Not like this.”  
  
Steve holds a long breath -- reminding himself of Loki’s kind, perhaps, a race immune to mortal ilness, beyond the strength of man to injure -- and he bites his lip and pushes himself in.  
  
It’s a tight fit, and Loki feels bliss as Steve presses in further. He’s without any grace, and he clutches Loki’s hips as if for dear life. “Are you -- is this -- ?”  
  
“Perfect,” Loki says, favouring him with the full smile he so rarely shows to anyone. “Now move. Or do you think me a sweet maiden to be cosseted?”  
  
That gets Steve thrusting -- clumsily, of course, with no rhythm in pace or length. Only untried instinct guides him, and there’s a thrill to his simple naïveté, and a delicious pressure over Loki’s cock when he presses down. Loki drinks in the vigorous cold of that strong body with its great heart, and as he feels the cold seep into him, he’s ready to come. He allows himself, but keeps from spilling as he gasps and shudders his pleasure.  
  
His mind is hazy for a moment, shivering its ecstatic release. Steve is gloriously oblivious, as Loki intended, and doesn’t pause in fucking him with that delicious energy. Loki clenches himself around Steve tightly, and Steve moans and pounds into him harder, faster, as if he were fighting a regiment of monsters. Loki brushes his fingers over the tip of his own cock, and Steve gives a shuddering moan. When Loki’s fingers are slick, he brings them to his mouth and licks them, sucks them, and Steve grunts like a beast and thrusts hard once, twice, and cries out softly as the waves of orgasm claim him.  
  
Loki does spill then, savouring a second climax, and barely swallows a complaint as Steve slides out of him a little later. They both breathe heavily, Steve the more so, and their bodies are beautiful with a sheen of sweat. With a quick hand Loki dries what’s needful, then settles as if to rest in comfort. He draws them close together and whispers in Steve’s ear: “Lie here a while.”  
  
Steve nods his assent. He’ll leave long before the night is over; Loki would not have it otherwise. But for a little while he takes pleasure in the rhythm of Steve’s breathing, the sound of his heart. The cold is on him a little less, Loki knows, and soon he will want the rest of it gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Loki occasionally likes to paraphrase A.G. Brodeur's (1916) translation of Snorri Sturluson's (1220) _Prose Edda_.
> 
>  
> 
> Images: corelite, maisonjaune, likefluffy, and iconographies (LJ).


End file.
